This GWT graph makes no sense: why does it say my site wasn't indexed til 6 wks ago?

[domino66]

I can't figure this out for the life of me. My site has been online for nearly a year.

But here's what my Google Webmaster Tools Index Status chart looks like:


This makes no sense to me. Why did Google only start INDEXING my site in early Sept (6 wks ago)?? The green line ("not selected") has this accompanying
definition:

Not selected: Pages that are not indexed because they are substantially similar to other pages, or that have been redirected to another URL.

But I don't think that would apply to my site...absolutely nothing changed (and the content was as high-quality as ever) before 6 weeks ago(?)

Also unexplained: I'm 99% sure that my site DID show up in Google SERPs (albeit for pretty specific search terms)...so how is it that that graph could be telling me that the site was not indexed by Google, and yet it DID show up in their SERPs?

[thegodfather]

Did you see any of your internal pages within the SERPs or just the homepage?

It could be to do with the fact that your internal navigation wasn't up to scratch - meaning Google had a hard time indexing the whole of your site, therefore just the homepage was indexed (which would explain why you saw it in the SERPs for brand-related phrases).

It's difficult to know without seeing the site itself. Was there an error in your robots.txt file, disallowing spiders from crawling certain areas? Have you changed anything?

[domino66]

Did you see any of your internal pages within the SERPs or just the homepage? It could be to do with the fact that your internal navigation wasn't up to scratch - meaning Google had a hard time indexing the whole of your site, therefore just the homepage was indexed (which would explain why you saw it in the SERPs for brand-related phrases). It's difficult to know without seeing the site itself. Was there an error in your robots.txt file, disallowing spiders from crawling certain areas? Have you changed anything?

Good Q, i actually don't remember if i saw any of the internal pages...i typically just searched for specific keyphrases that i knew would bring up my home page. But still: for that to have happened, they'd have had to INDEX the home page, right? And yet the blue line is ZERO (not 1) in that GWT graph.

Nothing changed around that time, to the best of my knowledge. We *did* start getting a lot of good press, and many more back-links...but still: we'd been online for 8 months prior to that. And then there's the matter of the GREEN line in that graph. It seems like Google's bot *was* crawling the pages, right? It just wasn't indexing them(?)